I have tested the DLL on both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and it seems to work well. However,please note this version is completely unsupported! Download at use entirely at your own risk.

You receive the following message when installing Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2010:

“Setup Wizard for Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2010 (KB981401) ended prematurely because of an error. Your system has not been modified. To install this program at a later time, please run the installation again.”

In my case this turned out to to be a User Account Control (UAC) gotcha. Basically, I didn’t launch the *.msp file using “Run as Administrator”. Interestingly, the error is misleading in that it doesmodify the system. If you look at the installed updates on the system the Update Rollup appears as being installed. In other words it is partly installed.

The steps to resolve the issue are:

1. Go to Control Panel, Programs, Programs and Features, Installed Updates. Highlight the update and then click Uninstall.

2. Open a CMD prompt using right-click “Run as Administrator”. Browse to the folder where the file is located and launch the file named Exchange2010-KB981401-x64-en.msp.

One of these days I’m really going to get the hang of UAC . Until I do, it would be really nice if the Microsoft product teams could provide more helpful error messages for UAC failures.

Sometimes it’s useful to pre-create computer objects in the correct OU before joining them to the domain. This way, you know that they will immediately pick up whatever Group Policies have been assigned to the OU. Of course, you can create the computer objects in AD manually using Active Directory Users and Computers (dsa.msc) or the new Active Directory Administrative Center (dsac). However, if you’ve got more than a few computer objects to create it might be helpful to have a script. Here’s a Powershell 1.0 sample:

The only other point of interest is that we need to define the sAMAccountName and the userAccountControl attributes in the script. The sAMAccountName is simply the NetBIOS name of the machine with a “$” suffix. It is also important to specify an appropriate value for userAccountControl – in this case a decimal value of 4128 which corresponds to 0×1020 (hex) or (PASSWD_NOTREQD | WORKSTATION_TRUST_ACCOUNT ).

As always, please let me know if you can think of ways to improve the script. Yes, that includes you Brandon!

Note: When copying the script from the web site, replace the double-quotes before you try it. WordPress does some funky format changes!